Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION of late 1958, when Fidel Castro marched into Havana and overthrew the old dictator Fulgencio Batista, was a curiosity. Castro's allegiances at the time were by no means clear; his later claim
to long-standing Marxist-Leninist sympathies was retrospective. He had
come to power as the only available leader of a broadly based coalition,
having received some support from liberal opinion in the United States.
However, this support dispersed as Castro clashed with U.S. economic
interests and showed no interest in elections. It was feared that Cuba
would trigger similar uprisings throughout the Americas and so extend
Soviet influence. As Latin America was the United States' natural sphere
of influence, any communist foothold appeared as an affront. When the
foothold was Cuba, so close to the coast of Florida, and personalized by
such a charismatic and bombastic figure as Fidel, the affront was all the
greater.

Senator Kennedy had acknowledged the sense of injustice that had led
so many Cubans to turn against Batista and the extent to which the United States had treated the country as a colony, apparently more "interested in the money we took out of Cuba than . . . in seeing Cuba raise
its standard of living for its people."
1 The Eisenhower administration had
hardly made it easy for Castro to come to terms with the United States,
supposing he had been inclined to do so. Its drive to deflect the regime
from communism only served to confirm it on this course. An early readiness to admit that there were injustices to be rectified might have served
as a basis for some sort of accommodation with revolutionary Cuba. However, as Castro's policy became more stridently anti-American a series of
tit-for-tat moves led to a complete breakdown in relations, and a sympathetic approach became an impossible position for any ambitious politician to hold.

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.